The existing industry standard for planar interconnects between two conductors is by gold wire or gold ribbon connection. Where any independent movement of the conductors can occur due to mechanical and/or environmental stresses, a loop in the interconnecting medium must be made to allow for stress relief. The amount of loop stress relief must be proportional to the amount of movement of the conductors. Unfortunately looping stress relief in high frequency RF interconnecting medium causes an impedance mismatch that results in poor VSWR and degradation of RF performance. Variability also occurs in forming the looping RF interconnection that further degrades RF performance. The act of assembling looping gold interconnects is typically a manual process that is above and beyond the other processes that are required to assemble a microwave integrated circuit.
In some instances it is not possible to form a reliable RF interconnection at high frequencies using conventional techniques. When this occurs costly mitigation steps must be taken which add to the overall unit cost.